Thursday, February 18, 2010

Filmmaker talks MACHETE MAIDENS and PATRICK remake

By Michael Gingold

Fango caught up with Australian director Mark Hartley,
creator of the amazing documentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY
OF OZPLOITATION!, while he was in NYC grabbing interviews for his follow-up,
MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED. This project is in a similar vein, covering the
history of genre filmmaking in the Philippines—though not so much homegrown
product, he points out.

“It looks not so much at Filipino exploitation movies, but
the Americans who went over there to shoot films,” Hartley (pictured below) tells
Fango, “so it’s kind of a fish-out-of-water story. It covers Roger Corman’s
productions, Cirio Santiago’s movies, the BLOOD ISLAND series and Eddie
Romero’s other pictures and Bobby Suarez, who literally just died two days ago.
Bobby made CLEOPATRA WONG, THE ONE ARMED EXECUTIONER, BIONIC BOY II and things
like that. They were films that tried to take on Hollywood and be mainstream,
but were kind of beyond mainstream in trying to do it.”

MACHETE MAIDENS will showcase interviews with quite a number
of B-movie stalwarts, including several Fango faves. “We’ve spoken to lots and
lots of cast and crew,” Hartley says. “We talked to Joe Viola, who went over
there with Jonathan Demme and made THE HOT BOX. We’re interviewing Eddie Romero
in the Philippines and a bunch of cast from the Corman and Santiago films who
have never really spoken about this stuff before, so it has been really, really
interesting. Sid Haig and Joe Dante, Allan Arkush and Jon Davison, who were all
working in the trailer and promotion department at New World when these films
were getting made; Jane Schaffer, who produced Jack Hill’s films, and Hill
himself. It will be pretty definitive, and this is an era that has never been
documented much, so it’s in the same vein as NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD—another untold
story.”

Having completed his Los Angeles interviews and wrapping up
his New York stint, Hartley next heads to London, Manila and Singapore, aiming
to have MACHETE MAIDENS ready in time to play the major festivals this summer
and fall. Director of photography Karl von Moller and co-editors Sara Edwards
and Jamie Blanks (the latter doing the score this time) are returning from NOT
QUITE HOLLYWOOD, and Hartley, who says the new docu will be in the same spirit,
is still enormously gratified by the response to that movie. “I was absolutely
amazed by the goodwill toward NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD; the feedback from people and
the reviews were beyond my wildest dreams. The fact that it has inspired many
people to go and seek out the films [it covered] is truly rewarding for me, and
for all the filmmakers who told their tales. Those movies have been dismissed
for so long, and suddenly the only places you can see them is at festivals!”

One Down Under chiller spotlighted in NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD
was Richard Franklin’s PATRICK, and Hartley reveals that he’s bringing a fresh
take on that tale of telekinetic terror to the screen. “After we finished NOT
QUITE HOLLYWOOD, I had discussed this with PATRICK’s producer, Tony Ginnane,
and we decided we’d take a crack at reinventing it. So Justin King and I wrote
a treatment and Justin’s working on the script at the moment, and hopefully, as
soon as MACHETE MAIDENS is finished, we’ll get right into it.”

The original PATRICK, written by Everett De Roche, is the
Hitchcock-influenced story of the titular young man, who goes into a coma after
electrocuting his mother and winds up in a hospital being tended to by Dr.
Roget and nurse Kathy Jacquard, who discover that despite his inert physical
state, he now possesses deadly psychic abilities. For the update, “We’re sort
of giving it a creepier, Gothic flavor, very much in a similar style to THE
ORPHANAGE,” reveals Hartley, who will direct. “There’s much more of a backstory
for Dr. Roget, and Patrick has dream sequences and flashbacks where he’s out of
the bed. We don’t want to turn Patrick into Freddy Kreuger; we like to think of
it as a love story with a body count. The great thing about the original was
the fact that here’s a guy with unlimited powers, but all he wants to do is use
them to manipulate the events in that nurse’s life to make her fall in love
with him. So we’ve kept that central premise and really upped the ante.”

Other elements will be altered, however. “The first PATRICK,
as much as it’s a really interesting film, is very much of its time. It’s
predominantly set in one hospital room, and we’re trying to open it up. To be
honest—and I’ve said this to Tony—it’s not that scary when you watch it now,
and we’re all about giving it those jolts. Obviously, I’m a fan of PATRICK, and
I want people who’ve seen the original to appreciate the remake, so we’re
certainly putting nods to the first one throughout the film, but we’re not
doing a Gus Van Sant PSYCHO. I believe Jamie’s remake of LONG WEEKEND [released
in the U.S. as NATURE’S GRAVE] suffers because they used the original script,
and when people love these films and know them so well, there’s no way that
they can embrace a film that’s so similar. We learned a lesson there, and we’ll
try to tailor our PATRICK for modern audiences.”

Ginnane is currently seeking funding and working on
pre-sales for PATRICK, and Hartley is hoping to start shooting before the end
of this year on a budget around $4 million. Clearly, he’s got a lot on his
plate this year—and couldn’t be happier about it. “I’d been trying to get a
feature going for a long time, and then NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, which I had worked
on for 10 years, got out there,” he says. “I was just so amazed to get brought
in on MACHETE MAIDENS; I was a gun for hire on it at first, and I changed the
concept to suit the story I wanted to tell and the people I wanted to meet. So
that has really taken over my workload, but if that comes out and I jump right
into PATRICK, I’ll be very, very happy.” (Thanks to Arianne Ayers)

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